Jewel Thief's Polished Image Nails Him

Get Serious!

March 30, 1995|By TONY GABRIELE Daily Press

In an age of increasing slovenliness and bad grooming - a time when nobody bothers to dress up, when movie stars walk around with skanky hair, when nobody even checks to see if there's dirt under their fingernails before they give you the finger - we'd like to send a Get Serious! salute to Eric P. Wilson.

Perhaps you read about Mr. Wilson in last Saturday's paper. He was convicted last week of stealing $5,000 worth of jewelry from a house in Roanoke, and according to The Associated Press account of his trial, it was Wilson's devotion to well-shined shoes that led to his arrest.

Wilson must have got his shoes scuffed while climbing into the house, the prosecutor theorized, so he paused during the burglary to shine them with a can of shoe polish and a monogrammed shoe rag he apparently carried with him constantly. Unfortunately for him, he left the polish and rag behind in the house, providing police with fingerprints that led to his arrest.

I'm sure you are all as impressed as I am with this gentleman's grooming standards. You check out your average burglar the next time one breaks into your home, and you'll find he probably hasn't bothered to spruce up at all. Just sneakers and an old sweatsuit, as likely as not, and he probably didn't even shave.

No, the thievery profession has just not been keeping up the grooming standards once set by such elegant movie jewel thieves as David Niven and Cary Grant. So let us hope that Wilson will set an example.

Wilson admitted to the judge that he had something of a fetish about keeping his shoes gleaming, the article said, "explaining that it probably had something to do with his days in the military."

This makes me wonder if he ever served under the captain who was my company commander at Fort Dix long ago. This captain was not satisfied unless we men had spit-shined our shoes to a reflective gloss so brilliant we could use them for shaving mirrors. He believed that if you weren't ready to spend gobs of time every day painstakingly buffing your shoe leather with little cotton balls, you didn't belong in the Army. Actually, I agreed with him wholeheartedly, at least as far as my belonging in the Army was concerned, but he never followed this line of reasoning to its logical conclusion.

I think his theory was that if only we soldiers shined our shoes enough, we would have won the Vietnam War:

VIET CONG COMMANDER: Men! Why are you retreating?

VIET CONG: We can't fight any more! The Americans blinded us by holding up their spit-shined low-quarters and reflecting the sunlight into our eyes!

But it is not unheard of for a person to be obsessed about a single aspect of grooming. Another such person, you may be surprised to learn, was my tough cousin Rocco, up in New Jersey.

Now, Rocco did not serve in the Army - he holds the distinction of being the only person the Draft Board ever declared 4-F on account of body odor - so he never acquired a shoe-polishing fetish. He was pretty much a slob in most of his other grooming habits, too.

But the one thing Rocco paid meticulous attention to was his hair.

Every day he spent long periods of time sculpting his locks, pushing his pompadour to ever-greater heights, giving the proper aerodynamic sweep to his ducktail, trimming and shaping his sideburns until they would make Elvis weep with envy.

Rocco's favorite movie was "Saturday Night Fever," which he saw 17 times. Every time it reached the scene where John Travolta carefully pats his hair into place before his bedroom mirror, Rocco stood up and cheered and whistled.

Other pompadour-intensive guys would buy their Brylcreem by the tube at the drug store. Rocco had his delivered at home by tanker truck. Rocco's hair was so lavishly oiled, one time when he was lighting a cigarette, a stray lock dangled forward and caught fire. It burned like a candle wick for 20 minutes before Rocco noticed.

So it is fortunate that Rocco never went in for burglary, or he would have met the same fate as the shoe-shining Wilson. A Brylcreem-sniffing dog would have led the cops right to him.